Ready to Take the Next Step
Feb 11, 2026 | Men's Golf, Sports Extra
By: D. Scott Fritchen
Picture this. Kansas State men's golf lost its best and most-veteran golfers from a team that narrowly missed out on advancing to the program's first ever national championship by only three shots at the NCAA Bremerton Regional. Now these 2025-26 Wildcats, with nearly an entirely new roster, comes off a fall season in which they finished top five in four of five events, and their top five golfers combined for 10 top-20 finishes, seven top-10 finishes and two top-five finishes.
Not too shabby.
Now the spring season is upon K-State, which opens at The Prestige at PGA West in La Quinta, California, on Monday through Wednesday. The five-event spring season culminates in the Big 12 Championship at Prairie Dunes Country Club in Hutchinson, Kansas, on April 27-29.
Then a potential NCAA Regional again?
There's talent on this team. And an excellent head coach in Grant Robbins, and assistant coach in Cullen Carstens, leading the way.
Robbins, now in his 12th season at K-State, has garnered four coach-of-the-year honors in his career and has guided nine times to postseason play. He has helped produce 40 team top-five finishes with eight team championships, and nine individual championships. Three of his K-State teams have advanced to the NCAA Regionals while seven golfers have made individual appearances.
Eight of the top 10 team scoring average marks have come under Robbins, who has taken a K-State team or individual to a current streak of seven-straight postseason appearances, the longest stretch in program history.
Grant Robbins spoke with K-State Sports Extra's D. Scott Fritchen about the successes in the fall season and looks ahead to the final push in spring for the new-look Wildcats.
D. SCOTT FRITCHEN: You're in the middle of your 12th season at K-State. You've taken the Wildcats to three NCAA Regionals and seven individual regional appearances, and you've guided your teams to eight of the top 10 team scoring average marks in program history. I know there's no secret sauce to your success, but I'm curious if you can put into perspective the climb it took since 2014 to make K-State consistently good, and then the ingredients required to keep K-State consistently good year after year?
GRANT ROBBINS: It's a collaborative effort. Number one, you have to have support by your administration, and our administration has been very supportive of our golf program, and the facilities have consistently improved, and that's made an impact on our program. You have to surround yourself with good people, and I've been very fortunate to have great assistant coaches. Cullen Carstens has been with me twice and has done a phenomenal job, and Rob Murray is doing an exceptional job as head coach at Long Beach State, so you have to have really good people around you. Then, obviously, you have to have really good players — players that work hard and buy into the vision that you have and improve. There's really no secret to it. You have to have support and a good network around you supporting you.
FRITCHEN: K-State comes off a fall season in which it finished in the top five in four of its five events. Exactly how impressive is that in your eyes and what were some of the aspects of the fall season that most pleased you?
ROBBINS: What pleased me the most is that this year we have pretty much an entirely new starting lineup, and last year at NCAA Regionals we had four seniors. So, we were very experienced, and this year we have a lot of new faces. It's a brand new lineup and guys were thrust into new roles, and we have new players who just came into the program. So, you didn't really know what to expect, but I was very pleased with their work ethic and just on the golf course, the kind of consistency and grit that they showed. There's something about this group. They really work hard, but they're also competitive and they've shown a lot of grit throughout the year and just keep continuing to work to get better.
FRITCHEN: What was your message to the team prior to the fall season and now having some time to reflect how well did their performance align with some of the thoughts you shared from the outset?
ROBBINS: Every year is a different team, but we kind of have the same core values and things that we want to impress upon the guys. Even with the new faces that we had, we had some returners, guys like Ben Stoller who's been in the program four years and JP Roller, some of those guys who really showed some good leadership and have carried on the culture we've established over the last few years. That's really helped. Guys came in and bought in and worked hard and went out for each tournament with the process and not getting caught up in results and preparing the best you can. I want our guys to play free in tournaments and give it everything they have, and then in the end see where we stack up.
FRITCHEN: What were the biggest challenges in the fall season?
ROBBINS: Really, just trying to find that consistency. One thing that's lacking on our team is not having that clear-cut star player, but the strength of our team is we have depth. With our team, any given week, someone can step up and be our top player. Alex Lindstrom really came on and got the win at Nebraska, and Shea Harmeson had some top finishes, and Ville Virkkala is playing very, very good as a freshman, and Oliver Toyer came in and had some clutch rounds for us at Arkansas. Everybody has stepped up at different times. We don't have that true clear-cut No. 1 so to speak, but we have five players who are capable of taking on that role any given week.
FRITCHEN: How do you feel like the break after the fall season benefited the team?
ROBBINS: It was really good. We met at the end of the fall and looked over things. One thing we're really trying to stress with our guys is getting the most of their rounds and cutting down on the big numbers and minimizing the bogeys. We have a team that can make a lot of birdies. We must have good strategy going into tournaments and being disciplined with our game plan and taking things as they come and not trying to force the issue. From a strategic standpoint, we're really emphasizing that part of the game, and minimizing the mistakes. We focused on improving skills, especially from controlling distances. Our focus over the offseason was getting our guys really, really good inside the 140-150 yards – the "scoring zone" – and getting their numbers and being able to control things like their launch angles and distance control. The guys really worked hard on that, and from the few weeks we've been back, I've seen some improvement in a lot of those areas.
FRITCHEN: In December, you signed sophomore Jack Taylor, who ranked sixth nationally in the NJCAA while starring at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix. What did you like most about Jack during the initial evaluation and what impresses you most about him now that you've gotten to know him and see his game up close?
ROBBINS: Jack was a late addition. We had signed a really good player from England, Max Reynolds, who we were counting on to come in and be one of our top players this year. He had his visa denied two weeks before the season started, so we tried hard to get in him in the spring, and he got his visa denied again in November. So, we had an open spot. Cullen researched players to find somebody who might be able to come in the spring and fill that spot. Jack was someone that we spoke with, and he was in a unique situation in the middle of his junior college year, but he was a qualifier, which meant he was able to come in and play right away. We hadn't seen him play before. We recruited him off his scores and talking to him on the phone and had him in on a visit, and we felt he could be a good fit for us and fill that gap that we had.
FRITCHEN: Your top five golfers in the fall all averaged under 74.00 and combined for 10 top-20 finishes, seven top-10 finishes and two top-five finishes with Alex Lindstrom finishing tied for first at the Git-R-Done Invitational. Can you briefly breakdown your top five and what kind of competition are you seeing from others to be in the mix to make a push to be in the top four or five?
ROBBINS: All of our players are capable of basically winning. The most experienced guy, Alex Lindstrom, was our top performer in the fall. He's been with us, and he came here from Hutchinson Community College after his freshman year as Freshman of the Year nationally. He played quite a bit his first year with us and last year he was on the fringe and in and out of that five and six spot with the experienced team that we had. This year he's been thrust into that role as being one of our most experienced guys coming back. He's really taken on that role and has gotten better each year. It was really cool seeing him break through with his phenomenal performance at Nebraska. He's a very, very hard worker. The strength of his game is his ball striking. He's extremely long off the tee. He can be a little streaky with the putter, but when his putter gets hot, he can go really low.
Our second-best performer in the fall was Shea Harmeson, a Division II transfer, who's here for his one year as a senior transfer. He's got a hockey background and actually played two years of college hockey in addition to golf. I like that he has a competitive mindset. He's had success at the lower level and has won tournaments, and he's shown his ability to play under pressure. His competitive mindset has been very, very beneficial to our team. I jokingly call him the "bounce-back king" because he's a guy who if he makes a mistake or has a bad hole, the number of times that he comes back with a birdie on the next hole is pretty amazing. It just shows his mental capacity in what he brings to the table.
Ville Virkkala is a freshman from Finland. He's very experienced coming in and has played in several professional tournaments as an amateur and has represented his country in tournaments all over the world. So, he isn't afraid of the big stage, and he's been very, very competitive. He's a very hard worker, very diligent and disciplined. He has an incredible demeanor on the course. Nothing phases him. He's a very intense competitor.
Oliver Toyer is a freshman from England, and he's another hard worker. The strength of his game is he's incredible from 100 yards. He's a very good wedge player, definitely the best putter we have on the team. When his ball striking is on, he's going to shoot low, but with his short game he's always going to have a score that contributes and counts. He's been that steady guy. As he continues to grow and mature and get bigger and stronger, he's just going to keep getting better and better.
Fionn Dobbin is a sophomore from Ireland who played quite a bit for us last year as a freshman and had some experience. He's maturing all around. It's always an adjustment for freshmen coming in, especially from another country. He's really starting to figure things out and mature all around and it's starting to show in his golf game.
That's kind of been our top five, but we have several others that you've going to see a lot of good things from like JP Roller, he's been playing really, really sold golf, so I wouldn't be surprised to see him in the lineup very shortly. Erik Holmberg from Sweeden struggled a little bit in the fall, but he played quite a bit for us last spring. He's just going through a little bit of a funk with golf, but he's really, really talented. He just has a great demeanor, and he's very competitive. He's going to figure it out pretty soon and be in the mix.
Tyler Strong is a sophomore from Kansas City, who got into the lineup for us a couple times in the fall. He's going to be in the mix, and then you have Ben Stoller and Jack Taylor, who are also providing some depth. Ben is an incredible leader. He's the ultimate teammate and has done a really, really good job in the leadership category and is definitely one of our hardest workers. Jack, being his first semester here, he's figuring things out, learning the golf courses, and figuring out how to play in the wind here. He's going to be in the mix as well.
FRITCHEN: As you head toward the spring opener at The Prestige, what are some things that you share with the team with five events to go until the Big 12 Championship?
ROBBINS: We'll just take it one day at a time. This offseason we've been working on some skill stuff individually with our players. As we get closer to The Prestige, we'll start preparing for that golf course. We've played that golf course before each of the last two years, and we've had some success there. It's a course that you have to be a little bit conservative off the tee. There's some very good bunkering on the course that you have to avoid. We'll just have to have a very good game plan going into it and certain holes that we can attack and others where we have to make sure we're playing smart and giving ourselves the best chance for success.
FRITCHEN: How does the spring schedule look for K-State?
ROBBINS: It's really good. We have a balance, and some tournaments we've played at before, which I think is important, to have that familiarity with Colleton River Collegiate in South Carolina, and going back to Myrtle Beach for the Michael A. Marino Classic. We've played there once a while ago, but it's a PGA Tour-caliber course with a strong field that'll be really good for us. Then we go to Mobile Bay Intercollegiate in Mobile, and we know that golf course fairly well, and then there's the Mossy Oak Collegiate in Mississippi, that's another golf course we're familiar with. I'm really looking forward to the Big 12 Championship this year with Prairie Dunes being right down the road from us.
FRITCHEN: When I say, "K-State Men's Golf NCAA Regional" what immediately comes to mind?
ROBBINS: That's the standard and expectation. That's where we want to get to every single year. We've either been to regionals or have been one of the first two or three teams out for six years in a row now. We're right there. We just need to take that next step — I want to be a program that has a regional every single year and is contending for the National Championship on a regular basis. You have to have a strong enough season to get that regional bid, but once we get that regional bid, we have to get over that hump. We've been close the last three years that we've been there, and we've been within three shots of going to nationals. That's something I want really badly, and I know the guys on our team have it tucked away to be that first team at K-State to get to a National Championship.
Picture this. Kansas State men's golf lost its best and most-veteran golfers from a team that narrowly missed out on advancing to the program's first ever national championship by only three shots at the NCAA Bremerton Regional. Now these 2025-26 Wildcats, with nearly an entirely new roster, comes off a fall season in which they finished top five in four of five events, and their top five golfers combined for 10 top-20 finishes, seven top-10 finishes and two top-five finishes.
Not too shabby.
Now the spring season is upon K-State, which opens at The Prestige at PGA West in La Quinta, California, on Monday through Wednesday. The five-event spring season culminates in the Big 12 Championship at Prairie Dunes Country Club in Hutchinson, Kansas, on April 27-29.
Then a potential NCAA Regional again?
There's talent on this team. And an excellent head coach in Grant Robbins, and assistant coach in Cullen Carstens, leading the way.
Robbins, now in his 12th season at K-State, has garnered four coach-of-the-year honors in his career and has guided nine times to postseason play. He has helped produce 40 team top-five finishes with eight team championships, and nine individual championships. Three of his K-State teams have advanced to the NCAA Regionals while seven golfers have made individual appearances.
Eight of the top 10 team scoring average marks have come under Robbins, who has taken a K-State team or individual to a current streak of seven-straight postseason appearances, the longest stretch in program history.
Grant Robbins spoke with K-State Sports Extra's D. Scott Fritchen about the successes in the fall season and looks ahead to the final push in spring for the new-look Wildcats.
D. SCOTT FRITCHEN: You're in the middle of your 12th season at K-State. You've taken the Wildcats to three NCAA Regionals and seven individual regional appearances, and you've guided your teams to eight of the top 10 team scoring average marks in program history. I know there's no secret sauce to your success, but I'm curious if you can put into perspective the climb it took since 2014 to make K-State consistently good, and then the ingredients required to keep K-State consistently good year after year?
GRANT ROBBINS: It's a collaborative effort. Number one, you have to have support by your administration, and our administration has been very supportive of our golf program, and the facilities have consistently improved, and that's made an impact on our program. You have to surround yourself with good people, and I've been very fortunate to have great assistant coaches. Cullen Carstens has been with me twice and has done a phenomenal job, and Rob Murray is doing an exceptional job as head coach at Long Beach State, so you have to have really good people around you. Then, obviously, you have to have really good players — players that work hard and buy into the vision that you have and improve. There's really no secret to it. You have to have support and a good network around you supporting you.
FRITCHEN: K-State comes off a fall season in which it finished in the top five in four of its five events. Exactly how impressive is that in your eyes and what were some of the aspects of the fall season that most pleased you?
ROBBINS: What pleased me the most is that this year we have pretty much an entirely new starting lineup, and last year at NCAA Regionals we had four seniors. So, we were very experienced, and this year we have a lot of new faces. It's a brand new lineup and guys were thrust into new roles, and we have new players who just came into the program. So, you didn't really know what to expect, but I was very pleased with their work ethic and just on the golf course, the kind of consistency and grit that they showed. There's something about this group. They really work hard, but they're also competitive and they've shown a lot of grit throughout the year and just keep continuing to work to get better.
FRITCHEN: What was your message to the team prior to the fall season and now having some time to reflect how well did their performance align with some of the thoughts you shared from the outset?
ROBBINS: Every year is a different team, but we kind of have the same core values and things that we want to impress upon the guys. Even with the new faces that we had, we had some returners, guys like Ben Stoller who's been in the program four years and JP Roller, some of those guys who really showed some good leadership and have carried on the culture we've established over the last few years. That's really helped. Guys came in and bought in and worked hard and went out for each tournament with the process and not getting caught up in results and preparing the best you can. I want our guys to play free in tournaments and give it everything they have, and then in the end see where we stack up.
FRITCHEN: What were the biggest challenges in the fall season?
ROBBINS: Really, just trying to find that consistency. One thing that's lacking on our team is not having that clear-cut star player, but the strength of our team is we have depth. With our team, any given week, someone can step up and be our top player. Alex Lindstrom really came on and got the win at Nebraska, and Shea Harmeson had some top finishes, and Ville Virkkala is playing very, very good as a freshman, and Oliver Toyer came in and had some clutch rounds for us at Arkansas. Everybody has stepped up at different times. We don't have that true clear-cut No. 1 so to speak, but we have five players who are capable of taking on that role any given week.
FRITCHEN: How do you feel like the break after the fall season benefited the team?
ROBBINS: It was really good. We met at the end of the fall and looked over things. One thing we're really trying to stress with our guys is getting the most of their rounds and cutting down on the big numbers and minimizing the bogeys. We have a team that can make a lot of birdies. We must have good strategy going into tournaments and being disciplined with our game plan and taking things as they come and not trying to force the issue. From a strategic standpoint, we're really emphasizing that part of the game, and minimizing the mistakes. We focused on improving skills, especially from controlling distances. Our focus over the offseason was getting our guys really, really good inside the 140-150 yards – the "scoring zone" – and getting their numbers and being able to control things like their launch angles and distance control. The guys really worked hard on that, and from the few weeks we've been back, I've seen some improvement in a lot of those areas.
FRITCHEN: In December, you signed sophomore Jack Taylor, who ranked sixth nationally in the NJCAA while starring at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix. What did you like most about Jack during the initial evaluation and what impresses you most about him now that you've gotten to know him and see his game up close?
ROBBINS: Jack was a late addition. We had signed a really good player from England, Max Reynolds, who we were counting on to come in and be one of our top players this year. He had his visa denied two weeks before the season started, so we tried hard to get in him in the spring, and he got his visa denied again in November. So, we had an open spot. Cullen researched players to find somebody who might be able to come in the spring and fill that spot. Jack was someone that we spoke with, and he was in a unique situation in the middle of his junior college year, but he was a qualifier, which meant he was able to come in and play right away. We hadn't seen him play before. We recruited him off his scores and talking to him on the phone and had him in on a visit, and we felt he could be a good fit for us and fill that gap that we had.
FRITCHEN: Your top five golfers in the fall all averaged under 74.00 and combined for 10 top-20 finishes, seven top-10 finishes and two top-five finishes with Alex Lindstrom finishing tied for first at the Git-R-Done Invitational. Can you briefly breakdown your top five and what kind of competition are you seeing from others to be in the mix to make a push to be in the top four or five?
ROBBINS: All of our players are capable of basically winning. The most experienced guy, Alex Lindstrom, was our top performer in the fall. He's been with us, and he came here from Hutchinson Community College after his freshman year as Freshman of the Year nationally. He played quite a bit his first year with us and last year he was on the fringe and in and out of that five and six spot with the experienced team that we had. This year he's been thrust into that role as being one of our most experienced guys coming back. He's really taken on that role and has gotten better each year. It was really cool seeing him break through with his phenomenal performance at Nebraska. He's a very, very hard worker. The strength of his game is his ball striking. He's extremely long off the tee. He can be a little streaky with the putter, but when his putter gets hot, he can go really low.
Our second-best performer in the fall was Shea Harmeson, a Division II transfer, who's here for his one year as a senior transfer. He's got a hockey background and actually played two years of college hockey in addition to golf. I like that he has a competitive mindset. He's had success at the lower level and has won tournaments, and he's shown his ability to play under pressure. His competitive mindset has been very, very beneficial to our team. I jokingly call him the "bounce-back king" because he's a guy who if he makes a mistake or has a bad hole, the number of times that he comes back with a birdie on the next hole is pretty amazing. It just shows his mental capacity in what he brings to the table.
Ville Virkkala is a freshman from Finland. He's very experienced coming in and has played in several professional tournaments as an amateur and has represented his country in tournaments all over the world. So, he isn't afraid of the big stage, and he's been very, very competitive. He's a very hard worker, very diligent and disciplined. He has an incredible demeanor on the course. Nothing phases him. He's a very intense competitor.
Oliver Toyer is a freshman from England, and he's another hard worker. The strength of his game is he's incredible from 100 yards. He's a very good wedge player, definitely the best putter we have on the team. When his ball striking is on, he's going to shoot low, but with his short game he's always going to have a score that contributes and counts. He's been that steady guy. As he continues to grow and mature and get bigger and stronger, he's just going to keep getting better and better.
Fionn Dobbin is a sophomore from Ireland who played quite a bit for us last year as a freshman and had some experience. He's maturing all around. It's always an adjustment for freshmen coming in, especially from another country. He's really starting to figure things out and mature all around and it's starting to show in his golf game.
That's kind of been our top five, but we have several others that you've going to see a lot of good things from like JP Roller, he's been playing really, really sold golf, so I wouldn't be surprised to see him in the lineup very shortly. Erik Holmberg from Sweeden struggled a little bit in the fall, but he played quite a bit for us last spring. He's just going through a little bit of a funk with golf, but he's really, really talented. He just has a great demeanor, and he's very competitive. He's going to figure it out pretty soon and be in the mix.
Tyler Strong is a sophomore from Kansas City, who got into the lineup for us a couple times in the fall. He's going to be in the mix, and then you have Ben Stoller and Jack Taylor, who are also providing some depth. Ben is an incredible leader. He's the ultimate teammate and has done a really, really good job in the leadership category and is definitely one of our hardest workers. Jack, being his first semester here, he's figuring things out, learning the golf courses, and figuring out how to play in the wind here. He's going to be in the mix as well.
FRITCHEN: As you head toward the spring opener at The Prestige, what are some things that you share with the team with five events to go until the Big 12 Championship?
ROBBINS: We'll just take it one day at a time. This offseason we've been working on some skill stuff individually with our players. As we get closer to The Prestige, we'll start preparing for that golf course. We've played that golf course before each of the last two years, and we've had some success there. It's a course that you have to be a little bit conservative off the tee. There's some very good bunkering on the course that you have to avoid. We'll just have to have a very good game plan going into it and certain holes that we can attack and others where we have to make sure we're playing smart and giving ourselves the best chance for success.
FRITCHEN: How does the spring schedule look for K-State?
ROBBINS: It's really good. We have a balance, and some tournaments we've played at before, which I think is important, to have that familiarity with Colleton River Collegiate in South Carolina, and going back to Myrtle Beach for the Michael A. Marino Classic. We've played there once a while ago, but it's a PGA Tour-caliber course with a strong field that'll be really good for us. Then we go to Mobile Bay Intercollegiate in Mobile, and we know that golf course fairly well, and then there's the Mossy Oak Collegiate in Mississippi, that's another golf course we're familiar with. I'm really looking forward to the Big 12 Championship this year with Prairie Dunes being right down the road from us.
FRITCHEN: When I say, "K-State Men's Golf NCAA Regional" what immediately comes to mind?
ROBBINS: That's the standard and expectation. That's where we want to get to every single year. We've either been to regionals or have been one of the first two or three teams out for six years in a row now. We're right there. We just need to take that next step — I want to be a program that has a regional every single year and is contending for the National Championship on a regular basis. You have to have a strong enough season to get that regional bid, but once we get that regional bid, we have to get over that hump. We've been close the last three years that we've been there, and we've been within three shots of going to nationals. That's something I want really badly, and I know the guys on our team have it tucked away to be that first team at K-State to get to a National Championship.
Players Mentioned
/ Men's Golf
/ Men's Golf
/ Men's Golf
/ Men's Golf
/ Men's Golf
/ Men's Golf
/ Men's Golf
/ Men's Golf
/ Men's Golf
K-State Women's Basketball | Game Replay vs Oklahoma State - February 10, 2025
Wednesday, February 11
K-State Women's Basketball | Coach Mittie Press Conference vs Oklahoma State
Wednesday, February 11
K-State Women's Basketball | Press Conference vs Oklahoma State
Wednesday, February 11
K-State Women's Basketball | Game Highlights vs Oklahoma State
Wednesday, February 11
